Two women who hadn’t seen each other in years met in a supermarket one day. One asked, “Tell me, Delia, how is your son George?”
“He’s getting along fine,” Delia replied. “He’s a poet. He just received his master’s degree in literature from the university.”
“And what about Mary?”
“She’s just as smart as George. She graduated from college with a degree in modern art.”
“Wonderful. And how is little Freddy? What is he doing?”
“Well,” Delia said, “You know Freddy. Freddy is still Freddy. He wouldn’t go to college — he became a plumber instead. If it wasn’t for him, we’d all be starving!”

Over the next few weeks we are going to see what the Bible says about work. By work I mean any kind of work. Paid work. Unpaid work. Voluntary Work. Church work. Housework. This series of sermons will be for everybody. For Breadwinners who go out and work to earn money. For Homemakers who work just as hard providing for the family. For those who have retired from paid work and keep just as busy doing all kinds of things which are still work! For those people who work primarily with their hands and those people who work mostly with their brains. If it’s any kind of work – that’s what we are talking about.

In later weeks we’ll be talking about witness at work and work as worship. And since there’s more to life than work we’ll think about rest and play as well. But we’ll begin today by answering two important questions. What does the Bible have to say 1) about WHY we work, and 2) about HOW we should do the work we do?

WHY DO WE WORK???

What are our motives for working? For some people, the reason they do work is primarily to provide for themselves and their family. Others work to earn enough to enable them to do what they consider to be their real work which is work for God. The reason some people work is so that they can support the church. Others work as a means to material prosperity. Some people do ordinary jobs just to fill in time until God calls them Christian service. Some people do their work because they realise that God created them to do that! Why do we work? Our work will be transformed when our motives are right!
FIVE POOR MOTIVES for doing work
To provide for my family
You’ve probably seen the bumper sticker, “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.”
You might also remember what the Bible says about our responsibilities to care for our family:
1 Tim 5:8 If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
If the only reason that will motivate somebody to work is the need to “make a living”, then that is sad. That is the bare minimum motivation for lazy people, not a worthy motive for God-inspired people. There are much better motivations than that!
To bring financial prosperity – working to have
Some people work not just to survive, but to gain wealth and possessions. I am NOT saying it is wrong to be rich – to have money and possessions. But Jesus gave solemn warnings about the risks associated with riches.
Mark 10:25 It is much harder for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.”
There’s a deep trap for us all here – if we are working just for the money and the possessions then they will becomes the focus of our lives, not God!!
Heb 13:5 Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have
To advance my career and bring me status
There is nothing wrong with being successful at work. Daniel, Joseph, Esther, Lydia, even the apostle Paul were all very successful in their chosen fields. Before the three years of his public ministry Jesus spent probably 15 years as a self-employed tradesman and craftsman. Jesus was a carpenter. That is how Nazareth knew him: “the carpenter”.
There is nothing wrong with having a successful career.
“All men want to succeed. Some want to succeed so badly they are even willing to work for it.”
But often the pressure to succeed comes from other people = bosses, workmates or colleagues. This seems to me to be a particular pressure in the business world. The danger is not only that if success and status are the driving forces in our lives, God can get squeezed out. There are also much better reasons for working than just for success and status.
To support me so that I can do the important things in life – church etc –
This sounds like a good idea – but it completely misunderstands and undervalues our daily calling. Work is not there as “tentmaking” to support us financially while we do our “ministry” in our “spare time”. The distinction we sometimes make between “secular work” and “sacred work” does NOT come from in the Bible. All work is the same in God’s eyes. There is no such difference between “the Lord’s work” and the kinds of work we all do when we aren’t at church or with other Christians.

Nobody’s “day job” is less important than “what they do in the church”. Nobody employed in full time Christian work would ever EVER believe that what we are privileged to do day by day is more important to God than all the other jobs that members of the church are doing day in day out.

To provide for the church-
Work is NOT there to provide God with money that he would otherwise be short of!! Of course it is a good thing to be able to earn money and give lots of it to the church and to needy causes, but if that is ever our motivation for working then we have missed the point!
There are five reasons which motivate some people in the work they do, and particularly in their paid jobs. I suggest that these are POOR motives for work. Let me give you instead five GOOD motives for doing work, and most of these apply just as directly to unpaid work as to paid work, and just as much to what we do in the church as to what we do for the rest of the week.
FIVE GOOD MOTIVES for doing work – 5 pure and worthwhile reasons for working
God works and we are created in His image to do the same
God created human beings to be in his image and to be his co-workers. Adam and Eve were taking care of the garden of Eden BEFORE the fall. Work is not some evil that entered the world because Adam and Eve messed everything up! Because God is a Creator, we his creatures are made to be creative. Humans were created to work!

Work is not a curse, it is a blessing from God who calls man to rule the earth and transform it so that the divine work of creation may continue with man’s intelligence and effort. Pope John Paul II (1920– )
A man should rejoice in his own works
Eccles 3: 13 That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil- this is the gift of God.
Eccles 5:19 Moreover, when God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work- this is a gift of God.

God wants us to find satisfaction and be happy in our work.

“Work is not primarily a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.” Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957)
Work is our minimum contribution to community and society
Work with your own hands 2 Thess 3: 10 For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.” 11 We hear that some among you are idle. … 12 Such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the bread they eat.
There was a sign in a shop window which read: NO HELP WANTED. As two men passed by, one said to the other, “You should apply—you’d be great for that job!”
I said that motives like working to provide for the family and to become rich were poor motives. There is a measure of selfishness in those motivations. But it is a good thing to work because we recognise that we owe it to the world we live in. There is no such thing as a free lunch. We owe it to the world and to God to do work to provide for our needs.
And we mustn’t make the mistake of measuring the importance of the work by how much a person gets paid for it! Homemakers work hard providing for their families. And if a breadwinner is unable to do paid work, perhaps if they just can’t find employment, they can always contribute to family and community and society by doing voluntary work. Society would collapse overnight if volunteers stopped doing all they do for other people. And so of course would the church and its activities.

Incidentally, retirement is not a reason for stopping doing work either. One aspect of retirement from paid work is that it gives us an opportunity to do all kinds of work which we may have wanted to do but our paid jobs didn’t give us as much time for. Different kinds of work, creative work, work in the church perhaps!
Do it as to the Lord and not as to men
Col 3: 22 Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to win their favour, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. 23 Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, …24 … It is the Lord Christ you are serving.

We aren’t serving God only when we are doing “Christian work or church work”. As Christians we are serving God WHATEVER we are doing, paid or unpaid. WHATEVER you do, it is the Lord Christ you are serving – so we must work wholeheartedly as for the Lord in everything we do!

Romans 12:1¶ So then, my brothers, because of God’s great mercy to us I appeal to
you: Offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to his service and pleasing to him. This is the true worship that you should offer.
God calls us to offer ourselves as living sacrifices Monday to Friday, not just Sundays!
We will think more about this when we talk about work as worship.
Seek first the Kingdom of God, and its righteousness
God calls us to seek His kingdom and to bring glory to Him whatever we are doing.
1 Cor 10:31 So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. The world around is watching us to see the difference Jesus makes to our lives. And for Christians in employment, our colleagues and neighbours and friends see much more between 9 and 5 over 5 days a week than they see in occasional hours outside work.
We will think more about this when we talk about witness at work.

So there we have five GOOD reasons motivating us in any work we do any time any place anywhere! That’s WHY we should work. But our second question is,
HOW SHOULD WE WORK???

Ecclesiastes 9:10 Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.
Someone once said, “Hard work never killed anyone, but why take the chance?” Somebody else said, “Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don’t turn up at all.”
The Book of Proverbs has lots to say about the importance of hard work and contains 19 warnings against laziness! We just read Colossians 3:23
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men

So the Bible says we should work hard! With all our might. With all our heart. But you busy overworked people don’t need me to tell you to work harder! The problem in today’s world, and especially if I dare say it here in suburbia, is that people so often misinterpret what it means to work with all your might and all your heart. Many people (Christians and not Christians alike) work TOO hard. People can so easily become workaholics – work can become their god! The challenge we face is to work the way God wants us to, without falling into the traps the world sets.

TEN RULES NOT TO FOLLOW AT WORK

1. Never say No to a request — always say YES.
2. Your job comes first; personal considerations are secondary.
3. Accept all invitations to meetings, dinners, committees, etc.
4. Go to the office evenings, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays.
5. Golf, tennis or other hobbies are a waste of time.
6. It is a poor policy to take all the holiday time you are entitled to.
7. Never delegate responsibility to others; carry the whole load at all times.
8. Do not eat a restful, relaxing meal — always schedule a meeting over the dinner hour.
9. If your work calls for travelling — work all day and drive all night to so you can arrive early for your appointment for the next morning.
10. Take the briefcase home on the evenings when you do not go to the office. This provides an opportunity to review completely all the troubles and worries of the day.

WE NEED TO KEEP WORK IN ITS PROPER PLACE!!! Too many people live by these 10 rules which should be how NOT to work! It is possible to work with all our might and with all our heart without letting work become our God, without becoming workaholics. We all need to find God’s balance for our lives.

In that balance, there is one more thing we need to remember when we are seeking to work with all our might and all our heart, and here we in the prosperous capitalist First World have lessons to learn from the Third World.
PEOPLE matter more than “getting the job done”
We Westerners we always want to pack lots of events into our busy schedules. Time drives us along, often much too fast for our own good. By comparison in the Third World time moves slowly, sometimes for good reason and sometimes for no reason at all. Their culture is simply NOT time-oriented.

In the third world it is the events themselves which really matter, the meetings, the discussions, the meals. The events dictate the timetable, not the timetable the events! Each event is allowed to take as long as it needs – sometimes a whole day for just one meeting. So they always have space to welcome visitors, whether they had been invited or are expected or not.
So often in the western world, and in London and the business world even more than other parts of Britain, we put work before relationships. If relationships get in the way of “getting the job done” we limit the relationships – simple examples: “no personal phone calls during office hours”, or, “spend time with the customers who are going to spend most, not gossiping with your own family or friends.”

But in Africa, family and friendships and relationships matter more than “getting the work done”. We can learn a lot from that attitude to time and timetables. Too often our western priorities are biased towards speed rather than towards people. When we are in a hurry to get things done it is easy to hurt people unintentionally. We need to remember that our relationships will last into eternity, so we should devote more time and energy to developing relationships even if that means we give less time to “getting things done”. In everything we do we need to work harder at building relationships and even if that means less energy for “achieving results.”

So, WHY should we work? What should be our motives for work? And HOW should we work? Sometimes we think we are glorifying God and fulfilling his will for our lives when we get immersed in our work. We feel that we are working with all our might and all our heart. But sometimes that means we have just fallen into the worldly ways of the workaholic. Or sometimes we have forgotten that people matter more than “getting the job done”. What will it mean for each of us this time tomorrow to do our work with all our might and all our heart? How can we all “seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness” in our places of work?

Let me finish with a story which I hope will make you think. I read the story a famous architect told about an incident which had a profound influence on the rest of his life. When he was a young boy, he went walking across a snow-covered field with his very serious determined single-minded uncle. As the two of them reached the far end of the field, his uncle stopped him. He pointed out his own tracks in the snow, straight and true, and then the young boy’s tracks meandering all over the field.
“Notice how your tracks wander aimlessly from the fence, to the cattle, to the woods, and back again,” his uncle said. “And see how my tracks aim directly to my goal. There is an important lesson in that.”
Years later this world-famous architect explained how this experience had shaped his philosophy in life. “I decided there and then NOT to miss out on the most interesting things in life, like my uncle always had.”